Idealism to the rescue!

Both "the right" and "the left" suffer from a one-sided focus on an aspect of poverty at the expense of the full picture. The right focuses on agency, and tends to dump the entire blame for their condition on the poor, failing to keep in mind adages like, "There but for the grace of God go I!"

The left tends to focus exclusively on circumstances, which winds up denying the poor any agency themselves, and portrays them like shelter animals waiting for a good progressive to come along and adopt them.

The reality is that both views are partial truths, each of which needs the other to round out the picture.

Although Hegel was somewhat mad at times, teaching us to look at these supposedly irreconcilable divides like this was surely a great contribution to human thought.

Gene, for those of us who haven't read anything about the politics of idealists, could you briefly explain why a belief that matter cannot exist independently of mind should correlate in any way with political beliefs?

Keshav, Who said they were correlated? Among the Hegelians we find communists (Marx and Engels, whose "materialism" was about economic factors of production, and not about metaphysics), fascists (Gentile), mild socialists (Green), middle-of-the-road liberals (Croce, Collingwood), and conservatives (Oakeshott, Ortega y Gasset).

"The right focuses on agency, and tends to dump the entire blame for their condition on the poor, failing to keep in mind adages like, 'There but for the grace of God go I'"

It's a really bad right now for "the right" when it comes to the whole issue of the poor. I've never found the political issues surrounding poverty and wealth all that interesting, so I'd like to consider that my neutral analysis of the situation.

And as far as progressives go, I think they can tend to be a little too—I hate using this phrase, because all it reminds of are angry movement conservatives—"bleeding heart". I don't think "bleeding heart" policies are necessarily paternalist, but sometimes it's difficult for them not to be.

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"All of this means that while the government has been artificially propping up the economy and 'stimulating' it through artificial means, peoples’ perceptions of economic life have been transformed into that which was intended by the central planners: the economic crush is over, our government cured all the problems, things are great again, go back to your old ways. Rinse and repeat."